Interdisciplinary Intellectual Movements

• The New Literacy Studies
• Situated Cognition Studies
• The New Literacies Studies
• The New Media Literacy Studies

The New Literacy Studies (NLS)

• Scholars composing were people from linguistics, history, anthropology, rhetoric and composition studies, cultural psychology, education, and other areas
• Traditional psychological approach to literacy
  • Viewed literacy as a “cognitive phenomenon”
  • Defined it in terms of mental states and mental processing (decoding, retrieving information, comprehension, inferencing, etc.)
  • The “ability to read” and “the ability to write” were treated as things people did inside their heads
• NLS approach to literacy
  • Viewed literacy as a “sociocultural phenomenon”
  • The “ability to read” and “the ability to write” were treated as something people did inside society

• Written language is used differently in different practices by different social and cultural groups
  • Religious text, popular culture texts, legal text, etc.
• People can read the same text in different ways and different purposes
  • Bible can be read as theology, literature, history, or self-help guide
• How one reads or writes is not just what’s in one’s head but rather conventions, norms, values, practices of different social and cultural groups
  • These groups also teach people to act, interact, talk, know, believe, and value in certain ways that go with how they write and read
  • Athabaskians, Native American and Canadian group, have a cultural norm in which they prefer to communicate only in known circumstances with people who are already known
    • Essays require writer to communicate to a “fictional” audience, assumed general “rational reader” not someone already known and thus violate a cultural communication norm
• Follow the social, cultural, institutional, and historical organizations of people first then see how literacy is taken up and used in these organizations, along with action, interaction, values, and tools and technologies

Situated Cognitive Studies

• New studies argue that the mind is furnished primarily by records of actual experiences not abstract concepts. This was a change in psychology during the 1980’s.
• Earlier work equated the mind to a computer with a set amount of data storage.

• The newer studies pose the theory that the human mind is nearly limitless, that we can essentially store almost all of our experiences then use these experiences to reason about similar experiences or new ones in the future.
• Situated Cognitive Studies is the “family” of related viewpoints. They share a common belief that thinking is tied to people’s experiences of goal oriented action in the material and social world.
• Human understanding and learning happens best when they use their prior experiences which then helps them to choose a course of action.
• Instead of using the computer model of earlier beliefs situated cognition uses the idea of parallel distributed computers. This means that they would be computers that store patterns among elements of input from the world.
• Humans look for patterns in their experiences, once they have more and more experiences they can find deeper and more subtle patterns that help predict what might happen in the future when they try to accomplish goals.
• An example of this is if one were to ask you to envision a bedroom. People have patterns of experiences that tell them there would be a bed, dresser night stand etc.

• So what determines what experiences a person has and how they pay attention to those experiences, i.e. how they find patterns in their experiences or what they pay attention to?
  • The answer is how that person participates in the practices of various social and cultural groups. These practices are then mediated by various tools and technologies (print, digital media etc).
• For example, bird watching clubs and expert bird watchers shape how new bird watchers pay attention to their experience of birds and environments in the field (Gee 1992). And these experiences are mediated in important ways by various tools and technologies such as bird books, scopes, and binoculars. Obviously one experiences a wood duck in a vastly different way when looking at it through a powerful scope than through unaided vision. Furthermore, such technologies allow distinctive social practices to arise that could not otherwise exist (e.g., debating the details of tiny aspects of feathers on hard to tell apart gulls).

New Literacy Studies & New Media Literacy Studies

New Literacies Studies

• Just like language, New Literacies Studies views different digital tools as technologies for giving and receiving meaning.

• Technology meanings are determined by the social, cultural, historical, and institutional practices of different groups.
• Technology involves ways of acting, interacting, valuing, believing, and knowing, as well as oral and written language.

New Media Literacy Studies

• Media literacy discusses how to give meaning to and get meaning from media, such as advertisements, newspapers, television, and film.
• This media “language” includes getting meaning from written language and images, sounds, and multimodal texts (text mixed with images and/or sounds).
• Media literacy also encompasses how a company sends a message through media and then is interpreted by a customer.
• Digital tools are giving rise to major transformations in society. It is easier now for people to not only consume media, but produce media.

• Digital tools have changed the nature of groups, social formation and power. With websites like Flicker, Facebook, digital devices and mobile phones, it is easier for people to engage in social, cultural and political action with constant feedback and communication.
• “Pro-Ams” are amateurs who have become experts in an area they have a passion for. These areas include: digital video, video games, digital storytelling, machinima, fan fiction, history and civilization simulations, music, graphic art, political commentary, robotics, anime, fashion design.

• “Pro-Ams” know how to collaborate with other Pro-Ams to fulfill their intellectual and social passions in the same field. Their knowledge goes more deep than it does wide.
• New Media Literacy Study explains how people engage proactively in a media world where production, participation, social group formation, and high levels of non-professional expertise are prevalent.

Popular Culture, Video Games, and Learning

• Children’s early oral language development, such as vocabulary and complex language skills, has a direct correlation with success in school.
• Trajectory learning with reading seeks to develop children’s oral language.
  • Trajectory learning opposes the traditional method of learning. Learning to read first begins with learning comprehension and decoding words. Text becomes more complex as students enter into higher grades
  • Developing oral language means to develop young children’s ability to use “technical” or “specialist” language.
• An example in developing children’s “technical” or “specialist” language skills. It’s important to combine informal learning with “technical” or “specialist” language in order to support the child’s learning throughout academia. By preparing the student early, they will be better prepared for higher levels of technical comprehension.
  • A mother and her son at a museum looking at oviraptors (dinosaur) and replica of their eggs. The child mentions that he sees an egg, the mother questions his knowledge and validates his knowledge by reading the text caption at the exhibit. In the conversation with her son, the mother uses technical language, such as, “oviraptor” to describe the species and also discusses the importance of “claws” and the use of the claws for hunting “prey.”
    
    
  • Gee exemplifies the importance of rooting knowledge presented to children in text, whether from a book, or a computer program. In this example, the mother used her son’s book and the exhibit description for textual support.

Informal Specialist-Language Lessons

• Before children enter school, they are usually exposed to informal “pre-school” and “pre-reading” lessons that make way for early reading instruction
• When the children actually start going to school, these specialist-language lessons continue both informally and formally
• There is a problem with students who come to school without these informal language lessons and other important lessons attributed to emergent literacy
• This is not just a problem with teaching “standard” English or ESL because even native standard English speakers need specialist-language lessons at an early age

Specialist Language and Popular Culture

• Children’s popular culture of today is very complex because it involves highly specialized styles of language
• Young children are exposed to these styles of language informally in peer groups, and parents use it to help accelerate their children’s language skills
  
  Example: (Yu-Gi-Oh Card) This card does not contain much specialist vocabulary, but it has complex specialist syntax. It uses “if-then” prepositions
• The card also contains classificatory information, which the child has to place within the scope of the whole network of cards (complex system of thinking)

• Main point is that there is value in learning language structures from video and card games, not that children’s early literacy should focus on specialist languages

Situated Meaning and Video Games

• Good grades and test scores doesn’t necessarily mean that children can problem solve

• “verbal” words—an ability to define words, but not apply them
• “situated” words—the ability to use and understand words in different situations

…stack it again.

The Relationship between Gaming and Situative Words:

• Gaming offers a way for students to learn about situative words
• Universal phenomena of gaming: texts about video games are meaningless unless one has played the game

Learning through experience:

• For video and computer games, the only real way to learn is through trial and error. The book will make sense once you’ve become comfortable with the game, but by then, you don’t really need the book anymore.
• Gee’s claim is that game-like learning (whether or not they’re video games) allow students to learn situative meanings

Subject	Author	Replies	Views	Last Message
New Literacy Studies & New Media Literacy Studies	maliahill	0	71	Jul 5, 2012 by maliahill

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   Gee J. P. (2010). A situated-sociocultural approach to literacy and technology. In Baker E. (Ed.), The new literacies: Multiple perspectives on research and practice(pp. 165–193). New York: Guilford.